Feb 22 2009
Siemens and E.ON Kraftwerke are to build a pilot CO2 capture plant at the E.ON power plant Staudinger in Grosskrotzenburg near Hanau. The two companies are thus pushing further ahead with the development of a process geared toward climate-compatible power generation. A lab-proven process is to be employed under real operating conditions at the power plant’s hard-coal-fired Staudinger Unit 5. The pilot plant is scheduled to start operation in the summer of 2009.
In the future, too, it will not be possible to meet the rapidly growing power demand without using fossil fuels such as coal and natural gas. The challenge is to attain a significant reduction of the CO2 emissions associated with the combustion of fossil fuels. In this context CO2 capture and storage technologies will be of decisive importance. They have to be tested for deployment in large plants, developed further and brought to market readiness.
With the post-combustion capture process developed by Siemens CO2 is removed from the power plant’s flue gas using special cleaning agents before the cleaned gases are discharged to atmosphere via the plant’s stack. One of the advantages of this technology is that it can be backfitted to the well-known thermal power plant process. Siemens has been developing this technology for several years at the Frankfurt-Hoechst industrial park. This process is characterized among other things by good environmental compatibility, comparatively low energy consumption and only very low loss of the cleaning agent used. In the pilot plant the cleaning agent’s long-term chemical stability and the efficiency of the process will be put to the test under real power plant conditions. In parallel, the technology will be further optimized in terms of energy consumption.
The pilot plant will be operated with part of the flue gas from Unit 5. E.ON Kraftwerke and Siemens intend to run the pilot plant on the site of the Staudinger power plant until the end of 2010.
This project is being sponsored by the German Federal Ministry of Economics under the terms of the COORETEC Initiative. It is part of the federal government’s 5th Energy Research Program “Innovation and New Energy Technologies” and promotes research and development in the field of low-CO2 power plant technologies.
“Because of its extensive experience both in the development of chemical processes and in power plant construction Siemens has the best credentials for successful development of an efficient CO2-capture process,” said Michael Suess, CEO of the Fossil Power Generation Division ofSiemens Energy. “The results achieved and the operating performance of the pilot plant will serve as the basis for large-scale demonstration plants, which are scheduled to start operation in the middle of the next decade.”
“As a major contribution toward climate protection E.ON is planning industrial-scale CO2 capture and storage for coal-fired power plants starting in 2020. Operation of this pilot plant together with Siemens is a major step in this direction,” said Gerhard Seibel, Technical Director responsible for new units at E.ON Kraftwerke.